The court said that search engines must weigh "the legitimate interest of internet users potentially interested in having access to that information" against the right to privacy and protection of personal data.

The BBC has had 76 stories removed from Google search results in Europe this year, incuding:

"We are doing this primarily as a contribution to public policy. We think it is important that those with an interest in the 'right to be forgotten' can ascertain which articles have been affected by the ruling. We hope it will contribute to the debate about this issue. We also think the integrity of the BBC's online archive is important and, although the pages concerned remain published on BBC Online, removal from Google searches makes parts of that archive harder to find."

He added: “…when looking through this list it is worth noting that we are not told who has requested the delisting, and we should not leap to conclusions as to who is responsible. The request may not have come from the obvious subject of a story.”

Google has so far received more than 37,000 requests from people in Britain to remove more than 126,00 links from its search results.